Historiography and National Identity Among The Eastern Slavs Towards A New Framework

National Identities, Vol. 3, No.
2, 2001
Historiography and National Identity among the Eastern Slavs: Towards a New Framework1
TARAS KUZIO, York University, Toronto, Canada
Abstract The article surveys Tsarist, Soviet and Western historiography of Russia and how this affected the national identities and inter-ethnic relations among the three eastern Slavs. Western historiography of Russia largely utilised an imperialist and statist historiographical framework created within the Tsarist empire during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although this framework was imperialist it was gradually accepted as objective by the Western scholarly community. Yet, this historiography was far from being objective. After 1934 Soviet historiography also reverted to the majority of the tenets found in Tsarist historiography. Within Tsarist, Western and Soviet historiographies of Russia eastern Slavic history was nationalised on behalf of the Russian nation which served to either ignore or deny a separate history and identity for Ukrainians and Belarusians. In the post-Soviet era all 15 Soviet successor states are undertaking nation and state building projects which utilise history and myths to inculcate new national identities. The continued utilisation of the Tsarist, Western and Soviet imperial and statist historiographical schema is no longer tenable and serves to undermine civic nation building in the Russian Federation. This article argues in favour of a new, non-imperial framework for histories of Russia territorially based upon the Russian Federation and inclusive of all of its citizens. Introduction This paper surveys the Tsarist, Soviet and Western historiography of Russia and the role and place for Ukraine within such a schema. Tsarist and Soviet historiography cannot be divorced from nationality policies which sought to prevent the development of a Ukrainian modern nation and national identity by maintaining them as Little Russian regional branches of the Russian people (Ruskii narod). It was though perhaps surprising that the historical scholarly community in the West also largely adopted this imperialist and statist schema. Russian, Soviet and Western historiography of Russia was imperialist and statist not nationalist. David Rowley argues that it is inaccurate and misleading to use the terms nationalism and nationalist vis-a ` -vis Russia and it is more appropriate to use imperialism and imperialist. Rowley believes That Russians expressed their national consciousness through the discourse of imperialism rather than the discourse of nationalism has far-reaching implications for both Russian history and nationalism theory.2 Russian patriots and Tsars glori ed in their multinational empire and did not attempt to create a Russian nation-state. The ideology that pervaded Russian discourse in the Tsarist empire was universalist, religious and multinational, all tenets that ruled
ISSN 1460-8944 print/ISSN 1469-9907 online/01/020109-24 DOI: 10.1080/14608940120059434 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd
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out nationalism. Russi cation was only applied in a systematic manner to Ukrainians in the Tsarist empire. After the collapse of the Tsarist empire in 1917 no Russian equivalent of Turkish nationalist Kemal Ataturk attempted to carve out a Russian nation-state. Indeed, Russian constitutional democrats, who politically dominated the Whites, supported the preservation of the empire and opposed demands for federal autonomy, let alone secession.3 In the former USSR no Russian dissident groups called for the secession of the Russian SFSR from the USSR.4 The Tsarist or Soviet regimes never promoted Russian nation building and the Russian homeland was the USSR. The Russian SFSR was the only Soviet republic not de ned as homeland for its titular nation and it therefore possessed no institutions of its own until 1990. Hence, ethnic Russian nationalism has been very weak in the post-Soviet era.5 In demanding sovereignty for the Russian SFSR President Borys Yeltsin was, Rowley believes, a nationalist. Nevertheless, the Russian SFSR was the only Soviet republic to not declare independence in late 1991 from the Soviet state and Russias independence day is based on its declaration of sovereignty in June 1990. Yeltsin was therefore if anything a reluctant nationalist and he supported a confederal Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) to replace the USSR.6 During the rst half of the 1990s the Russian Federation favoured economic and political reform over nation and state building. It was only in 1996 that Yeltsin suggested that a national idea should be created for the new state.7 Yitzhak Brudny argues that it is the absence of civic (in contrast to ethnic) nationalism that has undermined Russias post-Soviet political and economic transition process.8 In contrast, Ukraine ignored economic reform under President Leonid Kravchuk (1991 1994) and focused upon nation and state building. This paper argues that Russian, Soviet and Western scholars adopted a historiographical imperialist framework developed in the eighteenthnineteenth centuries. Although Soviet historiography accepted that Ukrainians were a separate people (they had, after all, their own republican homeland) this was a temporary phenomenon and the natural course of history would be for the eastern Slavs to unite under Russian leadership. The eastern Slavs were allegedly united in such a manner in Kyivan Rus and would be again united in the future Russian-speaking homo sovieticus. As Rowley points out, Tsarist imperialist universalism was recast as Soviet internationalism. All three schools, Russian, Soviet and Western, de ned non-Russian historiographies (i.e. Ukrainian and Belarusian) in a derogatory and cursory manner as nationalist. This paper also argues that traditional Russian, Soviet or Western historiography should no longer be utilised either within Russia or in the West because it denies the right to Ukrainians (and Belarussians) of a separate existence outside that of an east Slavic Ruskii union under Russian hegemony. In the aftermath of the disintegration of the former USSR such an approach becomes even more untenable because Ukrainians and the other non-Russians of the former USSR are now building new states, forging new nations and adopting new historiographies. This article is divided into four sections. The rst surveys Tsarist and Soviet historiography and shows the similarities between both after 1934 and how these in uenced the development of national identities among the eastern Slavs in the former USSR. The second section discusses Western historiography of Russia. The third section surveys the evolution of a new historiography in post-Soviet Ukraine as part of its nation and state building project. The nal section provides a new framework for eastern Slavic historiography that replaces the traditional imperialist framework adopted by Russian, Soviet and Western historiography with national historiographies
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that are traditionally used in Western civic states. A Russian national historiography that follows this national (non-imperial) framework would support civic nation and state building in the Russian Federation. The continued use of an imperialist historiographical framework serves to undermine Russias civic nation and state building project. This paper refrains from using the term nationalist to de ne either Russian or Ukrainian historiography because it implies a subjective negative judgement on the part of the scholar using the term. For example, Western scholars have continued to negatively de ne as nationalising nation building and national historiographies that are emerging in post-Soviet states, such as Ukraine. Those propagating such policies are also negatively de ned as nationalists.9 In this paper the historiography of Russia is therefore de ned as imperialist, using Rowleys framework. Ukrainian historiography is de ned as national, not nationalist. A non-imperial Russian historiography territorially based upon the Russian Federation could also be de ned in such a manner as national. Tsarist and Soviet Historiography What historical legacies did Ukrainians and Russians inherit from the former USSR which they now have to grapple with? Indeed, what are these profound and often disturbing legacies? The Russian historian, Yury Afanasev, complained that, there is not, nor has there ever been a people and country with a history as falsi ed as ours is 10 Soviet historiography after 1934 largely returned to the Tsarist Russian scheme of history. It was a historiography, which could, for the most part, be read with approval by the tsars themselves, Lowell Tillet commented.11 Soviet historiography after 1934 served the goals of the Communist Partys nationalities policies in the elaboration and inculcation of new myths and legends. Crucial elements of this elaborate historical myth which Soviet historiography aimed to propagate were:12 rehabilitation of the past; superiority of Great Russians as natural leaders; the lack of ethnic hostility now or in the past; help in the creation of a new Soviet patriotism; there were no conquered territories, only unions and re-unions. Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin had been wrong to condemn Tsarist Russian expansionism. The views of Bolshevik historians in the 1920s, such as Mikhail Pokrovs kyi, who had condemned Tsarist expansionism, were also condemned; these unions and re-unions brought only positive bene ts or, at a minimum, were the lesser of two evils; greater centralisation was a positive development; nationalist agitation was against the wishes of the narod; the non-Russians were incapable of creating their own state; the Russian mission civilisatrice was bene cial; the History of the USSR was in effect that of the History of Russia. The Russian Federation did not therefore have its own separate history which dealt purely with the Great Russians or Muscovites; non-Russian histories were treated as regional histories of Russia; Russian control over Ukraine and Belarus was never perceived as annexation; merely the recovery of the Tsars patrimony. In 1947 and 1954 new theses codi ed
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the eastern Slavs as historically belonging to one Ruskii narod. Use of the terms Russian, Rusian and east Slavic became inter-changeable;13 Ukrainians and Belarusians are not separate peoples, but branches of the east Slavic Ruskii peoples. Therefore, they should not have their own independent states, which are only temporary, but should be in union with Russia.14 Soviet historiography restricted the collective memory and identity of each nation within the former USSR to that of an ethnie and geographical unit through a russo-centric bias. Within eastern and southern Ukraine this Tsarist and Soviet historiography reinforced a strong all-Russian component already part of popular consciousness. It channelled the collective historical memory and national awareness generated by modernisation into an ethnographic regionalism compatible with Soviet loyalty.15 Independent Ukraine therefore inherited local, ethnographic and pre-modern identities in eastern and southern Ukraine where the loyalties of the local population were multiple (towards the Ukrainian SSR as a geographic unit, pan eastern Slavism, the CIS and/or the former USSR).16 From the 1830s Russian historiography tailored the past to t the present. It sought to justify Russian rule over Ukrainian territories not in terms of conquered territories but as rule over peoples with the same history, language and cultures in an attempt at denying these lands to the Poles. There could not be therefore any oppression of Ukrainian lands because there was allegedly cultural unity of the east Slavs. The oppressors of the Ukrainians were the Polesnot the Russians. The persistence and success of this historiography in shaping the identities of eastern Ukrainians can be clearly seen in the views of Volodymyr Hryniov, Leonid Kuchmas liberal-leaning Inter-Regional Bloc of Reforms ally in the 1994 Ukrainian presidential elections. His ideological treatise Nova Ukraiina, Iakoiu ia ii Bachu (The New Ukraine: How I see it) argues that only Polishnot Russianrule in Ukraine was negative.17 Much of his complimentary views about Tsarist Russian rule are in uenced by Soviet historiography.18 The myths and legends formulated within Soviet historiography had gone full circle by the early 1950s. By the time of Stalins death further revisions of Soviet historiography made the Soviet interpretation of UkrainianRussian relations into a near replica of the of cial Tsarist interpretation.19 The 1954 Thesis on Re-Union, to mark the 300th anniversary of the Ukrainian-Muscovite 1654 Periaslav Treaty, replicated and updated much of the schema originally formulated within Nicholas Is Of cial Nationality policy of the 1830s. Nikolai Ustrialovs 1837 Russkaia Istoriia had been reprinted 10-fold by 1857 and if he had been alive in 1954 he might have been pleasantly surprised to see how his in uence had survived three decades of Soviet communism and Soviet internationalism. By 1991, after 6 years of glasnost, only one Russian historian had summoned up the courage to reject the 1954 Thesis. Mark von Hagen believes that there has been very little attempt on the part of Russian historians to reject the imperial scheme of Russian history in the Russian Federation.20 Since the collapse of the former USSR publishing houses in Moscow and St Petersburg have been re-publishing Tsarist surveys of Russian history. Unfortunately, newly written histories of Russia do not limit themselves only to surveying Muscovy, the Great Russians or the Russian Federation. They are in fact palimpsests of the histories of the USSR complete with the notions of old Russian nation and the reunion of Ukraine and Russia in 1654.21 The propagation and digestion of these myths and legends were as disastrous in their
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legacies both for the Russian Federation and for its relations with Ukraine. They reinforced a Russian tendency to identify not with their Soviet republic or post-Soviet independent statebut with empire (Tsarist Russia, the former USSR and/or the CIS). This, in turn, impeded the development of a Russian civic national identity and national consciousness. It also reinforced the view that Ukrainian independence is temporary and out of step with the historical and pre-ordained destiny of the union of the east Slavs.22 The collapse of the former USSR left Russians rudderless when attempting to come to terms with the collapse of the Soviet state, from which they had been the only republic which had not declared its independence. Experts existed in Moscow on the smallest Caucasian ethnic groups and the most exotic of foreign countries. Yet, few Russian historians, political scientists or international relations experts had ever bothered to study Ukraine or Belarus.23 The works of Mykhailo Hrushevskyi, the doyen of Ukrainian historiography, still remain untranslated into Russian. Aleksander Tsipko, the well known Russian philosopher, believes that the post-Soviet Russian leadership knows little about Ukrainian historians or its culture, as re ected in the broadcasts of Russian Public Television (ORT) to the CIS.24 The only difference between post-1934 Soviet historiography and that of the Tsarist era rested on the recognition by the Soviets of separate Ukrainian and Belarusian ethnic groups. These though, were to be only transitional phenomena because Ukraine and Belarus were slated to merge with the Great Russians into the new Russian-speaking homo sovieticus, a return to the alleged east Slavic unity of Kyiv Rus. The growth of the Muslim populations of the former USSR during the Leonid Brezhnev era placed greater emphasis upon the fusion of these three east Slavic peoples to provide a Russian-speaking core for the Soviet state. Such a core would continue to provide Russians with a greater than 50 per cent share of the Soviet population. Western Historiography of Russia Western historians working in conditions of academic freedom were free to pursue the study of Russian history in as objective a manner as is possible within history. Nevertheless, Western histories of imperial Russia and the former USSR usually portrayed it as a homogenous nation-state rather than as a multinational empire.25 As Mark von Hagen found Certainly, no mainstream Russian historian ever de ned the empire as such; rather, they chose to write the history of Russia more or less as the history of a nation-state, or at least one in the making.26 Only Hugh Seton-Watsons survey of Russian history devoted some attention to the non-Russians.27 Western histories of Russia, therefore, unconsciously followed the assumption previously laid out by Tsarist of cials that nationality policy should be tailored to create a nation-state from the Russian empire. This, in turn, could only be undertaken by assuming that Ukrainians and Belarusians were also somehow Russians. Such a policy and historiography was patently misplaced and could only be premised upon a denial of any history for Ukrainians and Belarusians separate to Russian. As Theodore R. Weeks argues And yet the Russian Empire was not, and could not be, a nation-state. Any effort to make the Russian Empire into a national state was doomed to failure.28 Any attempt to transform the Tsarist Russian empire into a nation-state modelled on Germany and based on the core Russian (Ruskii, that is, east Slavic) peoples assumed two factors.29 Firstly, that Ukrainians and Belarusians were ethnographic raw material and simply regional ethnoses of the larger Ruskii narod.30 That is, they were
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simply Little or White Russiansnot separate nations. The only choice, therefore, given to Ukrainians and Belarusians by the Tsarist authorities was to become either Poles or, more preferably, Russians.31 Secondly, that the non-Slavic peoples of the Tsarist empire would agree to assimilation into this planned Russian nation-state or enter into voluntary union with it. This policy, supported by Tsarist of cials and all non-left-wing political parties, rejected any group rights (cantons, autonomy or federalisation) for the empire. In view of the fact that Great Russians were less than 50 per cent of the empires population at the turn of the twentieth century viewing the Tsarist empire as a potential nation-state in the making where the non-Russians could be somehow successfully assimilated was misplaced. Why then did Western historiography of Russia not follow their colleagues writing on Austria-Hungary who had little hesitation in describing it as a multinational empire and not as a budding nation-state? Equating the Tsarist empire with an embryo nation-state and not recognising Ukrainians or Belarusians as separate nations meant that as far as Russians were concerned charges of russi cation were misplaced. The adoption of the higher Russian language and culture by Ukrainians and Belarusians was and is viewed as similar to the cultural and linguistic assimilation of Germanys outlying provinces into a German cultural nation. In the Soviet era Russian was the language of modernisation and the future homo sovieticus. Nation building, as Connor has stated, is, after all, also usually associated with nation destroying. Hence, accusations of nation destroying and russi cation against the Tsarist and Soviet regimes within past and contemporary Ukrainian and Belarusian historiography is still met with confusion and misunderstanding among Russians. To Russians the assimilation and integration of outlying provinces is viewed as a net gain while to Ukrainians and Belarusians this is likely to be viewed as a net loss. Western historiography of Russia also had little to say about nationality problems and russi cation. Such a russophile approach is undertaken by a recent Western study of Ukrainian nationalism by Andrew Wilson. Wilson consciously does not use the term russi cation in his study because this assumes loyalty to Ukrainian language and culture which may not have existed. Many Russophone Ukrainians have indeed been deprived of access to their native language and culture; others have always existed in a Russophone environment.32 The term russi cation has therefore been avoided by Wilson because it implies a prior loyalty to Ukrainian language and culture which may not necessarily have existed.33 Contrary to these claims by Wilson, most historians believe that the Tsarist regime deliberately promoted policies of russi cation and prevented Ukrainian and Belarusian nation building.34 The dissemination of a historiography which viewed the Russian empire as a nation-state was in uenced by Michael Karpovich at Harvard University which shaped the post-war generation of Russian historians in North America and Europe.35 They placed their faith in the modernisation theorists of social scientists such as Karl Deutch, who argued that industrialisation and urbanisation would erode national differences and homogenise populations. The application of such modernisation theories to the USSR suggested that ethnic differences would decline, nationality problems were minute and the achievement of a homo sovieticus was a real possibility. By the early 1980s Western historians of Russia, together with the bulk of their colleagues in Sovietology, had therefore concluded that the nationality problem had been resolved in the USSR.36 The national question was also therefore largely ignored within Sovietology.37 Western historians and authors of Russian history become confused in their narra-
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tive by following the traditional eighteenthnineteenth century imperialist and statist framework laid down by Russian historians. These, as pointed out earlier, were not very different to those of Soviet historiography from 1934 onwards, except that in the Soviet schema Russian imperialism was inter-woven with Soviet internationalism. Pal Kolsto points out that that Western historians backed their Russian colleagues over questions such as the ownership of Kyivan Rus and utilised Russian imperialist historiography: Western historians have generally accepted the Russian time perspective. True enough, certain e ` migre ` Ukrainian historians have always maintained that this was a theft of the history of the Ukrainian people, but most of their Western colleagues have brushed these objections aside, dismissing them as rather pathetic manifestations of Ukrainian nationalism.38 By nationalising Kyivan Russian history for the Muscovites/Great Russians historians accomplished three tasks. First, Western historians forfeited any claim to objectivity which would have been better served through treating Kyivan Rus as a state to which all three eastern Slavs had equal title. Secondly, they ignored the pre-thirteenth century roots of Muscovy by focusing exclusively upon Kyivan Rus. Thirdly, they denied Ukrainians and Belarusians any logical beginnings to their histories by ignoring them completely until brie y mentioning them in the mid-seventeenth century during Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytskyis Cossack revolt. Western historians sought to emphasise Ukraines ties to Russia while down-playing any non-Russian links by which she may have been in uenced. Ukrainian and Belarusian history were marginalised and subsumed within Russian history in the West (as it was in the former USSR). Courses in Ukrainian or Belarusian history in Western educational curriculums were few and far between. The brief emergence of Ukraine and Belarus at different times could not but be confusing to the pupil, student and reader for: Ukraine emerges in many Russian history classes from nowhere (usually from the Cossack uprising against Poland) to become involved in the revolution of 191721, nally in helping to dismantle the Soviet Union.39 In addition to marginalising 60 million people from the study of history, the traditional Tsarist, Soviet and Western historiography of Russia nationalised all cultural and external in uences upon Ukraine and Belarus. This has only served to provide a highly unobjective and lopsided account of Ukrainian and Belarusian histories whose normal condition allegedly always was to be in union or close association with Russia. This has served to ignore the wide-embracing non-Russian in uences upon Ukraine and Belarus. Ukraine and Belarus had long periods of existence outside the con nes of the modern Russian state. Although Ukraine and Muscovy signed the Treaty of Periaslav in 1654 the Ukrainian Hetmanate did not lose its autonomy until the last two decades of the following century. Right up until the 1860s Polish cultural in uences were more in uential than Russian in Kyiv and central Ukraine, where the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church was dominant until the 1830s. Its western regions remained outside Russias embrace until the Second World War. Roman Szporluk points out: It is obvious that todays Ukraine cannot be viewed simply as a part of a historic Russia or modern Soviet space; Ukraine is intimately linked not only to Russia but also to the countries of Central Europe and the Black Sea region.40
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Western Historians on Russia Not all Western historians of Russia utilised the imperialist and statist framework inherited from Tsarist historiography. B.H. Summner, writing in the 1940s, was then already adamant that: It is quite true that Russian history until recently has usually been written too much from the angle of Moscow and imperial Russia, with the consequence that the special development of the Western lands and the distinctiveness and achievements of the Ukrainians have been belittled and ignored; it is also true that Ukrainian nationalist historians have contributed a large new fund of knowledge by their researches.41 Summner admirably discussed the division of the eastern Slavs into two groups after the Mongol invasion of the thirteenth century. These created the Muscovites, who inter-mingled with the Finns, and the Ukrainians and Belarusians who came under Lithuanian-Polish in uence. Summner devotes some space in his Survey of Russian History to the Ukrainian Question which discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the national movement. Where he falls into a trap of his own making is to label only Ukrainian historians as nationalists, because they argued in favour of treating the eastern Slavs as distinct ethno-cultural entities, while failing to apply the same label to Russian and Western historians who followed the nineteenth century Russian imperialist and statist school. Traditionally only Ukrainian historians were de ned as nationalist while Russian and Western historians were de ned as somehow objective. The majority of Western historiography of Russia failed to heed Summners advice and continued to utilise a Tsarist imperialist and statist historiography that denied Ukrainians and Belarusians any history of their own. Vladimir Volkoff begins his history of Russia with the phrase, Russia begins with Vladimir the baptist and ends with Vladimir the apostate?42 This grew into Holy Russia which was only to be later divided arti cially into 15 republics. Another similarly poor use of methodology is John Lawrences A History of Russia.43 This book, we are told in the preface, is a book about the Russian people, not about their neighbours. The Kyivan era is described as the cradle of Russia with its famous Russian black earth and rst Russian farmers. Southern Russia, is where the Russians rst entered history in the seventh century, and the region where the Russian religion was established. The statist school of Russian history is once again clearly re ected in James H. Billingtons The Icon and the Axe. An Interpretive History of Russian Culture.44 Russian culture, he argues, is a tale of three citiesKyiv (the mother of Russian cities), Moscow (the heart) and St Petersburg (the head). We read about early Russians, Kievan Russia, Russian soil, Old Russia, the Russian language and Russian theology.45 Basil Dmytryshyns edited collection Medieval Russia. A Source Book, 9001700 only refers to Kievan Rus when discussing this era.46 But the books very title will associate Kyivan Rus with Russia in the eyes of most readers. Janet Martins Medieval Russia 980158447 follows the same logic as Dmytryshyns study. The entire period covered in her book is de ned as Russian history with the Kyivan legacy transferring to Vladimir/Suzdal and then on to Moscow and St Petersburg. Yet, confusingly, she states that, In the year 980, an obscure prince landed on the northern shores of a land that became known as Rus and later, Russia. This seems to contradict the thesis of the book, which is entitled a survey of Medieval Russia that
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includes the Kyivan Rus erayet ends at a period in time before the term Russia was coined in the early eighteenth century. Martin ignores the evidence, discussed later in this paper, that the traditions and political culture of Vladimir-Suzdal/Muscovy were very different to those of Kyivan Rus. These traditions were passed into the Galician-Volhynian principality after the disintegration of Kyivan Rus and then into the Lithuanian-Ruthenian (i.e. UkrainianBelarusian) state. The Cossacks of the sixteentheighteenth centuries also based their political and cultural traditions upon Kyivan Rus (e.g. the Viche council, after which the parliamentary journal in post-Soviet Ukraine is named). Hence, Russian and Western historians can only point to dynastic ties that link Vladimir-Suzdal and Muscovy to Kyivan Rus. If dynastic ties are used to claim historical pasts elsewhere in Western Europe this would create a multitude of competing claims between different royal houses. The British royal family, for example, has historical ties to the former German monarchy. In outlining the views of the statist Russian school of history (S.M.Solov ev and V.O. Kliuchevskyi) that argues in favour of the transfer of the Kyivan to the Imperial era as stages in the history of one nation Martin only devotes four lines to the alternative view propounded by the Ukrainian historian, Hrushevskyi. This alternative view argued that the Kyivan Rus tradition was inherited by the Galician-Volhynian Principality in what is now western Ukraine. Martin admits that although Kievan Rus and Muscovy were inextricably, if paradoxically, linked nevertheless, Muscovys political structures contrasted sharply with those of Kievan Rus .48 Muscovite traditions did indeed radically differ from those of Kyivan Rus yet very few Western historians have gone on to conclude, as did Hrushevskyi, that this was because these Kyivan Rus traditions were inherited by Galicia-Volhynianot Vladimir Suzdal. Lionel Kochans The Making of Modern Russia only utilises Kievan Rus to refer to the medieval era.49 But by including it within a survey of Russian history the reader is again left in no doubt as to how Kyivan Rus is part of Russian history because this period represented, The formative centuries of Russian history .50 Two surveys of Russian history by Nicholas V. Riasanovsky51 and Michael Florinsky52 are written by Russian e ` migre ` s and were very in uential in Western historiographies of Russia. In contrast to the nationalist label usually attached to Ukrainian historians, such as Hrushevskyi, e ` migre ` Russian works, such as Riasanovskys or Florinskys, became quite in uential and were treated as objective studies within scholarly circles. Riasanovsky, like Kochan, surveys Russian history from Kievan Russia to Soviet Russia as one continuous narrative of the Russians. Kievan Russia is therefore described as the rst Russian state and the region geographically coined as southern Russia which spoke the Old Russian language.53 Therefore, Rus became identi ed with the Kievan state, and the very name came to designate the southern Russian state as distinct from the north.54 Although Riasanovsky admits that the term Russian was coined much later he nevertheless applies it to the medieval state of Kyivan Rus while only brie y mentioning Ukraine during the sixteenthseventeenth centuries.55 Riasanovskys terminological confusion is evident when he discusses the division of the eastern Slavs into three nations after the disintegration of the Kyiv Rus state. Why then call it Kievan Russia and thereby nationalise it on behalf of Russian history? Both Riasanovsky and Hoskings (see later), in the tradition of Russian, Soviet and Western historiography, describe Kyivan Rus as a united state of eastern Slavs whose unity was only broken because of the Mongol invasion. Viewed in such a framework, Ukrainians and Belaru-
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sians are accidents of history and their natural state is to be in union with Russians. The eastern Slavs are therefore perceived as three regional branches of Russians who could, if history and circumstances had permitted, be integrated into a single nation. Ukrainians and Belarusians are therefore Bavarians, not Austrians. On a visit to Germany in 1991 then Parliamentary Speaker and later that year President Leonid Kravchuk demanded the right to a Ukrainian-language interpreter. Members of the Russian media corps ridiculed this demand, claiming it was as ludicrous as Bavarians coming to Moscow and demanding an interpreter to translate a Bavarian dialect.56 This re ected the common Russian view that Ukrainians wereand continue to beconstituted within Russian identity as a regional branch of Russians. When referring to the Galician-Volhynian principality and the Lithuanian-Ruthenian/Rus principality Riasanovsky calls their inhabitants Russians, and the territories the two south-western Russian lands and the Lithuanian-Russian state respectively.57 It is dif cult to understand how these areas could be populated by Russians and be Russian when they were never part of the Muscovite state or Tsarist empire and were incorporated within the Russian sphere of in uence only in 1939 when they were annexed from Poland. The bulk of Ukrainian territories did not come under Russian jurisdiction until the late eighteenth century when Tsarina Catherine abolished the autonomous Ukrainian Hetmanate. After the disintegration of the Kyiv Rus state in 1240 the majority of Ukrainian territories were either independent in the Galician-Volhynian principality or under Mongol rule. They then passed under Lithuanian, Polish-Lithuanian and then Cossack rule. The 1654 Treaty of Periaslav between Ukraine and Muscovy was concluded after the Poles refused to consider the Ukrainian Cossack proposal to transform the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth into a Polish-Lithuanian-Ruthenian (i.e. Ukrainian/Cossack) commonwealth. Ukrainian Cossack Hetman Khmelnytskyi signed the treaty on condition that Ukrainian autonomy be recognised by the Muscovite Tsar. This Ukrainian interpretation of a confederal relationship of two equals has continually clashed with the Russian, Soviet and Western view of Ukraines submission and/or re-union with Russia. Russian links to Kyivan Rus and Ukrainian lands were therefore broken for four centuries. When the Treaty of Periaslav was discussed in 1654 both sides used interpreters and Ukrainian (Ruthenian) Cosacks had a clear perception of Muscovites (as well as Poles and Tatars) as foreign Others. The Tsarist empire only began to integrate the autonomous Ukrainian Hetmanate over a century later and to russify its population only after the 1860s. Western Ukraine continued to remain under Polish, Austrian, Austrian-Hungarian and then again Polish rule until 1939. Similarly, from the disintegration of Kyivan Rus until the late eighteenth century Belarusian territories lay outside Russian control. It was only with the partitions of Poland in the 1770s and 1790s that they were annexed by the Tsarist empire. These historical facts throw into doubt the eighteenthnineteenth century imperialist framework adopted by Russian and Western historians that sought to portray Russian imperial rule over Ukraine and Belarus as a long continuous process of national development from Kyivan Rus to the present. They have therefore been conveniently ignored by both Russian and Western historians. Historical objectivity would nd that both Ukraine and Belarus spent more time outside Russian in uence and control within the con nes of ve European states (Poland, Lithuania, Austria, Hungary and Romania). Florinsky also follows the standard Russian imperialist and statist historical schema utilised by Russian and Western historians of Russia. Kyiv Rus is the rst new
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Russian state which covered the rst three centuries of Russian history while Ukraine is de ned as the fertile regions of southern Russia.58 In 860 the Russian army appeared at the gates of Constantinople and in 1043 Yaroslav, a statue to whom was unveiled in Kyiv in May 1997, organised the last Russian expedition against this city. After the conquest of a foreign city in 1169 by Andriy Bogoliubsky the Kiev chapter of Russias history was closed.59 Florinsky believes, as do many historians and writers, that after the disintegration of Kyiv Rus Russian history divided into two directions from a common source which led to the, territorial distribution of the three chief divisions of the Russian people .60 In other words, the Russians, united in Kyiv Rus, were arti cially divided by living in separate states into the three branches of the eastern Slavs that we know today. This Russian imperialist school of historical thought was de ned as objective by Western historians and continues to dominate their historiography even after the disintegration of the USSR. Western Historiography of Russia in the Post-Soviet Era Has Western historiography of Russia adapted to the disintegration of the former USSR and the formation of independent states? An attempt to come to terms with the confusing methodology utilised by Western historians of Russia is provided by Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepard in their The Emergence of Rus 7501200. Early on in the book they state: This book is and is not an account of the emergence of a thing called Russia. The further we pursue the thing into the past, the more misleading our modern vocabulary becomes If we picture Russia as a state inhabited mainly by people who think of themselves as Russiansif, that is, our notion of Russia is coloured by current political or ethno-cultural geographythen most of this book is not about Russia at all, or at least not about Russia alone.61 Franklin and Shepard go on to argue in a convincing manner that: The story of the land of Rus could continue in one direction towards modern Russia, or in other directions towards, eventually, Ukraine or Belarus. The land of the Rus is none of these, or else it is a shared predecessor of all three.62 Unlike the overwhelming majority of Western historians and writers these two authors therefore have consciously not used the eighteenth century-coined terms Russia or Russians. Nevertheless, the book is the rst volume of Longmans History of Russia, which the publishers do confuse with Kyiv Rus. Therefore, by placing the rst volume within this series the reader will of course assume that Kyiv Rus is the rst stage of Russian history. Geoffrey Hoskings Russia. People & Empire, 1552191763 aims to break new ground by focusing upon how Rossiia obstructed the owering of Rus. Or, if you prefer it, how the building of an empire impeded the formation of a nation. Yet, there is little new from what one would expect to nd in standard Western Histories of Russia.64 Hoskings differentiates Rus/Ruskii, the people, from Rossiiski, the empire. By doing this, Hoskings believes that one can separate the pre-imperial state and imperial Russian empire into two distinct objects of study.65 By differentiating these two periods he hopes to show how the growth of the Russian empire (Rossiia) obstructed the
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evolution of the pre-imperial Rus into a nation. Hence, my story concerns above all the Russians.66 The most dif cult factor impeding Russian nation building was that which Hoskings does not attempt to deal with, namely the question of Russias Ruskii problem. Hoskings does not for example look to Muscovy as his pre-imperial object of study, which could conceivably be de ned as the rst (Great) Russian nation-state. Instead, his object of pre-imperial study is Rus, an entity that includes all three eastern Slavs. Implicit in this choice by Hoskings is his assumption that Rus constituted one united entity that would have evolved into a Russian nation-state if only its unity had not been destroyed by the Mongol invasion of 1240. Ukrainians and Belarusians would have then presumably not come into being because the vacuum left by the disintegration of Kyivan Rus would not have been lled by Polish and Lithuanian expansionism into southern Kyivan Rus (i.e. present day Ukraine and Belarus). To disentangle the peoples of the Russian empire, for example, Central Asians, from those of Rus is, after all, a far easier task than disentangling the eastern Slavs as separate nations. Hoskings equates the Ruskii narod to the English and Turkish peoples while he equates the Rossiia empire to the British or Ottoman empires. Hoskings backs this claim by reference to the Belarusians, who do not seem to know who they are in the post-Soviet era, and the alleged division of Ukrainians into the nationalist, Ukrainian-speaking west and the pro-Russian, Russian-speaking east and south.67 Riasanovsky also speculates in a manner similar to Hoskings that if the alleged unity of Kyiv Rus had been maintained it might have evolved into a singleand not threenation.68 By utilising a nineteenth century Russian imperialist and statist historical framework, which Hoskings and other Western historians continue to do, they still nd it dif cult to explain how Russians, who allegedly happened to live in todays Ukraine in the medieval era, were then replaced by Ukrainians at an undisclosed later stage. As Hoskings, to his credit, points out: Ukraines loss of its distinct national identity was more complicated than that of any other region of the empire.69 The banning of the Ukrainian language through a wide variety of of cial acts in 1863 and 1876 were, after all, unique in the Russian empire. The reason for it, Hoskings believes appears to have been that the national identity of Ukrainian peasants was an unusually sensitive matter for of cials.70 The large numbers of Russian speakers and identity crisis in both Ukraine and Belarus is not therefore a natural yearning to be in union with Russia, as many scholars and journalists conclude. But, as Hoskings himself admits, it is a product of Tsarist and Soviet nationality policies that deliberately prevented nation building in both countries. When nation building was encouraged, as it was in Austrian-ruled western Ukraine between the late eighteenth century and 1918, it led to the development of a central European, in contrast to pan eastern Slavic identity.71 Paul Magosci points out that While Ukrainianism was being suppressed in the Russian Empire, all the fundamentals that make possible a viable national lifehistory, ideology, language, literature, cultural organisation, education, religion and politicswere being formally established in Austrian Galicia.72 The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Russia and the Former Soviet Union,73 compiled by Archie Brown, Michael Kaiser and Gerald S. Smith, includes no separate section devoted to any non-Russian republic of the former USSR. The authors, as is often the case with Western historians, confuse and use interchangeably the terms Russia, Russian empire and the USSR. Russia and Russian are interchanged with im-
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perial and Soviet throughout the Encyclopaedia . Kyiv Rus, again as is usually the case, is consistently called Kievan Russia with everything to do with this state also de ned as Russian (the Primary Chronicle, laws, etc.). A similar approach is undertaken by the 1995 edition of the Concise Columbia Encyclopaedia which describes Kyiv as the capital city of Kievan Russia which broke up into principalities in 1054. Kievan Russia was allegedly the, earlier forerunner of Russia and the USSReven though the Concise Columbia Encyclopaedia admits that it included all of present-day Ukraine and Belarus and only north-western Russia. Martin Gilberts 1972 Dent Atlas of Russian History74 was reprinted in 1993 with only minor revisions to the modern period that took into account the collapse of the Soviet empire. It spans Russian history from 800 BC to the present through the prism of the standard translatio of Russian statehood from Kievan Russia, Vladimr-Suzdal, Muscovy to Peter the Greats Russian empire. Anything to do with the pre-Vladimir-Suzdal era (economics, territory, religion), is termed Kievan Russia and the inhabitants of this state Russians. Similarly, John Channons and Robert Hudsons Penguin Historical Atlas of Russia,75 which utilises the same nineteenth century imperialist and statist historical framework, has its opening chapter entitled The Origins of Russia. Unfortunately, like with many Western authors, Channon and Hudson interchange between using Kievan Russia and Kievan Rus in a manner which leads one to assume that they believe them to be one and the same; that is, populated by Russians. The history of Rus between 10541237 is therefore assumed to be part of The Orgins of Russia, a Russia which allegedly Christianised itself in 988. The Soviet state, we may recall, celebrated the millennium of Russian Christianity in Moscow in 1988, a city which did not exist until nearly two centuries after Christianity arrived in Kyiv and six centuries after the founding of the city of Kyiv itself (Kyiv celebrated its 1500th anniversary in 1982). Western Historiography of Russia and Ukraine The overwhelming majority of Western historians working on Russian history utilised the Tsarist imperialist and statist historiographical frameworks which tended to portray Russia as a nation-state, ignoring the non-Russian nationalities who made up more than half of the population of the Tsarist empire. This has a particularly damaging impact upon the case of Ukraine. As the historian Norman Davies argued: The best thing to do with such an embarrassing nation (Ukrainians) was to pretend that it didnt exist, and to accept the old Tsarist ction about their being Little Russia. In reality they were neither little nor Russian.76 By consciously or otherwise following in the traditions of Tsarist Russian historiography Western historians succeeded in accomplishing that which had been intended by Russian historians. By describing Russian history as one long, continuous evolution from Kyivan Russia, Vladimir Suzdal, Muscovy to the Russian empire, Ukraine was disinherited from any claim to historical statehood and thereby denied any future claim to independent statehood.77 By asserting Muscovite and Russian claims to the territories of Kyivan Rus any claim from Poland or Lithuania could be denied, but this also served to deny it to Ukraine. Nothing is heard therefore about Ukraine in traditional Tsarist or Western Histories of Russia until, as if conjured up from out of thin air, it appears in the seventeenth century only again to disappear after being reunited with Russia in 1654. David
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Saunders argued that, Despite Ukraines centrality standard works on the history of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union say relatively little about it.78 Saunders attributes this to two reasons: Western historians derived their view of Ukrainians from Russian interpretations; these historians were dependent upon publications sanctioned by Russia and hence focused upon the Russian heartland. The outcome is that many Western authors of Russia become unconsciously Great Russian centralizers,79 and standard Western accounts of the former USSR treated the eastern Slavs as one homogenous whole. Consequently, is it so surprising that Western government leaders were wont to enquire of former Ukrainian President Kravchuk in which part of Russia was Ukraine located?80 Historiogaphy and Nation Building in Ukraine The entire region of the former Soviet bloc is today in the throes of challenging the russo-centric historiography, myths and legends which the Soviet state sought to propagate and make its citizens believe. In Ukraine Tsarist and Soviet historiography came under attack in the late 1980s, at the same time as the national revival and political opposition gathered momentum. The traditional Russian historiographical schema was rejected rst by the Ukrainian cultural intelligentsia and political opposition, to be followed in the early 1990s by the political establishment. The rehabilitation of Hrushevskyi was of primary concern after ve decades of denunciation as a German agent and bourgeois nationalist. Hrushevskyi had been the President of the socialist-leaning Ukrainian Central Rada in 19171918 but returned to work as a historian in Soviet Ukraine in the more liberal environment of the 1920s. He was anything but a nationalist. Since Ukraine became an independent state the Hrushevskyi schema has to all intents and purposes become the of cial line followed by historians and political gures.81 The extent to which Hrushevskyi has become part of the of cial mainstream could be seen by President Kuchmas preface to a commemorative book devoted to him published in 1996. In Kuchmas view, Hrushevskyi was the founder of the revived Ukrainian state in the twentieth century, a historian of world renown. Hrushevskyis signi cance lay in his devotion to Ukraines national revival, the revival of its genetic memory, a deep understanding of its own history. Hrushevskyi developed a concept of the historical development of the Ukrainian people, he proved that our people has its own core origins. Therefore, Hrushevskyis 11-volume History of Ukraine-Rus, which was largely ignored by Western historians of Russia and denounced by their Soviet counterparts, is to Kuchma the historical Bible of the Ukrainian people, a fundamental work .82 Clearly the evolution of a new national historiography in Ukraine will challenge Western, Soviet and Russian historiography of Russia. Sevcenko, a scholar of Byzantium, pointed out at the launch of the English-language translation of the rst volume of Hrushevskyis History of Ukraine-Rus how There have been no serious attempts to refute Hrushevskyi on the basis of facts by any historian practising the craft.83 The revival of a Ukrainian national historiography based on the Hrushevskyi framework claims the Kyiv Rus state as a proto-Ukrainian state on territorial grounds for Ukrainian history. It also argues that Ukraine is a natural part of Europe (not Eurasia) which developed historically different from that of Muscovy and Russia.84
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This is coupled with long-standing demands for the return to Ukraine of assets (from Russia) which are the national, historical and cultural property of the Ukrainian people according to a list determined by the Ukrainian government.85 Many of these items were deposited in Russian museums and galleries with the purpose of associating Kyivan Rus with Russia. The study of Kyivan Rus in the former USSR was forbidden in Ukraine and was undertaken only by historians in the Russian SFSR. The development of a Ukrainian historiography which rejects the pan eastern Slavic Russian imperialist and statist school will have a profound in uence upon Ukrainian and Russian national identities. The Russian imperialist and statist school had taught Ukrainians and Belarusians to believe they could never create their own state, that they were only the Little Russian branch of the Russian nation and that Tsarist and Soviet rule was bene cial. But, what is positive in Russian historiography is usually perceived as negative in Ukrainian.86 The Tsar liberator Alexander II banned the Ukrainian and Belarusian languages. Tsarina Catherine may be positive to Russians as a reformermoderniser and empire builder but to Ukrainians she is remembered as the destroyer of the autonomous Ukrainian Hetmanate state. Tsarist history, to which Russian historians now return in search of their pre-Soviet Russian greatness, is regarded by Ukrainians as a tragedy.87 The Ukrainian education system uses the same textbooks and national histioriography throughout its territory, regardless of whether the region is primarily Ukrainian or Russian speaking.88 History teaching in education plays an important role in nation building in newly established states, such as Ukraine. Wilson argued that the teaching of national historiography in Russian speaking areas of Ukraine would lead to discontent from the local population who would oppose these policies of the nationalising state.89 Yet, no such protests and opposition to the teaching of this historiography have occurred except by the Communist Party which stands to lose the most from the replacement of Soviet by Ukrainian national historiography. The revival of former, and the development of new, historiography, myths and legends in post-Soviet Ukraine challenges Tsarist, Western and Soviet historiography of Russia and the eastern Slavs because it questions many of the assumptions found in these three historiographies. Russian rule is no longer portrayed as progressive, russi cation and imperial rule are condemned, former traitors are reinvented as national heroes through monuments, stamps, medals, currencies and street names. The Ukrainian Cossack leader Hetman Ivan Mazepa, for example, who allied himself with the Swedes against Russia in 1709, was routinely condemned by Tsarist and Soviet historiography. His picture is used on one of the new Ukrainian bank notes introduced in 1996 and a monument is being built to him in Kyiv. This new currency, the hryvnia, was a unit of currency used in Kyiv Rus and the independent Ukrainian Peoples Republic (UNR) of 19171918. The national symbol, the tryzub (trident), was also used both in Kyivan Rus and the UNR. The hryvnia and tryzub back up Ukraines claim to a 1000 year tradition of statehood by linking contemporary Ukraine to Kyivan Rus and the UNR. Kyiv has a number of recently built monuments which are also of Kyivan Rus personalities, which further ties Ukraine to the medieval state.90 (The Russian Federation has not built statues of the Kyivan Rus era, and has instead focused upon historical gures such as Peter the Great.) Historiographies of independent states chronicle the history of the territory under study back to time immemorial. Ukrainian historiography, both in Ukraine and in the two new Western studies by Orest Subtelny and Paul Magosci, discussed later in this paper, also incorporate events, personalities and different peoples that took place and
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lived on Ukrainian territory back to pre-historic times. For Magosci the rst period of Ukrainian history is BCE 1150 to CE 850 and he looks to central-eastern Poland, southern Belarus and north-western Ukraine as the original Slavic heartland.91 Anatol Lieven believes that it is ridiculous to trace back the history of Ukraine to the medieval era because nations only emerged in the modern era in the late eighteenth century. This is mistaken in two areas. Firstly, Western European histories are histories of the territories that became nation-states in the modern eras. British history, for example, incorporates the Celts, Romans, Anglo Saxons, Picts, Scots, Welsh and Normans. Using Lievens framework no country in Europe would have a history prior to the late eighteenth century! Secondly, Lieven assumes that there is only one school of nationalism theory, the modernist school that argues that nations only arose at the same time as modernisation and industrialisation. There are other schools of nationalist theory which disagree with the modernist camp either wholly, or in part, which Lieven ignores. Thus the question of the medieval state of Kyivan Rus, the majority of which lay in Ukrainian territory, inevitably arises in this new historical discourse. Lieven argues that nationalists in both Russia and Ukraine are engaged in a struggle for exclusive possession of the legacy of Kyivan Rus. Ukrainians, in particular, are literally obsessed by this issue, and it gures strongly in the ideology of extremist parties in both countries.92 Since the eighteenth century Russian historians have argued that Kyivan Rus was the rst Russian state and that Vladimir-Suzdal and then Muscovy are the only direct heirs to it. Lieven is therefore mistaken to believe that it is an extreme claim by Russian and Western historians that Ukrainians are de ned as a regional branch of Russians (Little Russians). He is also wrong in believing that, Serious Western historians have little truck with either nationalist version.93 Western historians did support a historiography that Lieven de nes as nationalist and which I de ne as imperialist. This paper surveys both Russian and Western historiography of Russia and shows that it nationalised Kyivan Rus on behalf of Russian history and de ned Ukrainians and Belarusians as regional branches of Russians and/or ignored them all together. This historiography was de ned as objective and a derogatory nationalist label was only attached to Ukrainian historiography. It is indeed curious that Russian and Western historiography that denied or ignored two nationalities was classi ed as objective whereas Ukrainian historiography that never denied the existence of Russians was de ned as nationalist! Magosci, for example, sees no problem in dealing with the question of Kyivan Rus. He interchangeably uses Rus/Ukraine and the Rus/Ukrainian people as analogous to that of the Franks/French or Romans/Italians. Indeed, he believes that it is not uncommon for any territory in Europe or elsewhere to have had different names for its inhabitants and its homeland in the past. Hrushevskyi also used the analogy of France to Rome/Italy to describe the relationship of Muscovy/Russia to Kyivan Rus. Post-Soviet Ukrainian historians look upon Kyivan Rus in two main ways. One approach is to argue that it should be included wholeheartedly within Ukrainian history: the Antes created the rst proto-Ukrainian state, that it was based in Ukraine and was the precursor to Kyivan Rus. This has a long tradition in Ukrainian scholarship, although this school of thought has been totally ignored by Western and Russian scholars. The anonymous History of Rus (Istoriia Rusov) published in 1846 in Moscow argued that Kyivan Rus should be treated as part of Ukrainian history.94 As a history of a people Hrushevskyi argued that the people resident in Kyivan Rus became over
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time Ruthenians (Rusyny, from the word Rus) and then in the second half of the nineteenth century they re-named themselves as Ukrainians to more clearly differentiate themselves from Russians. Ukrainian scholars therefore looked to ethnic, demographic and territorial links between themselves and Kyivan Rus. In contrast, Russian and Western scholars looked only to dynastic links. Should ethnic links be grounds for laying claim to history and territory as applied by Russian imperial historiography approaches the eastern Slavs? The western Slavs and southern Slavs, for example, are not treated as single units that should be naturally united in single states on ethnic grounds. If a claim is made on the basis of ethnic ancestry we would have the absurd possibility that the English, who came as AngloSaxons from Jutland, Anglen and Lower Saxony, could be rede ned as Germans! An interpretation along these lines, Jeremy Paxman concludes, would lead us to argue that, The English race, if such a thing exists, is German.95 The term Ruthenians (in the Ukrainian language Rusyny) is still used by eastern Slavs to de ne themselves in the remote region of north-eastern Slovakia.96 Ruthenians could refer to Ukrainians and Belarusians and they contrasted themselves to Muscovites (Moskali), which referred to the ancestors of present day Russians. The term Russia (Rossiia) was a supranational term invented only in the early eighteenth century by Peter the Great to describe his empirenot any ethnic group. Interestingly, Russians have never used the term Ruthenians (Rusyny) to de ne themselves, unlike Ukrainians and Belarusians, a factor which indicates a weaker link by Russians to Kyiv Rus. A second line of enquiry within post-Soviet Ukrainian historioraphy is to argue that the eastern Slavs only began to evolve into three separate nationalities in the latter part of Kyivan Rus. In 1136 and 1169 Novgorod and Vladimir Suzdal respectively, both within the Muscovite domain, rebelled against Kyivan rule. Jaroslav Pelenski, for example, argues that The sacking of Kiev in 1169 and the policies of Andrei Bogoliubskii towards Kiev serve as primary evidence against the Muscovite Russian continuous theory.97 This school of thought argues that the Mongol invasion of 1240 that destroyed Kyivan Rus merely accelerated a process of separate development for the eastern Slavs that was already underway in the twelfth century. These scholars also argue that Kyivan Rus was mainly based in Ukraine and therefore Ukrainenot Russiainherited the Kyivan Rus legacy. Although these two schools of thought on Kyivan Rus differ from one another they both provide alternative frameworks to Russian, Soviet and Western historiography in three areas.98 Firstly, all currents within Ukrainian historiography reject the imperialist and statist framework common in all three of these traditional historiographies. As I have already demonstrated, this is because all three denied the existence of, or completely ignored, Ukrainians and Belarusians. Secondly, Kyivan Rus is described as either a proto-Ukrainian state in toto or as a common but loose eastern Slavic state until the twelth century. No current in Ukrainian historiography can accept that Kyivan Rus was the rst Russian state, the dominant view in all three traditional historiographies of Russia. Thirdly, Ukrainian historiography argues that political institutions, the social sphere and culture of Kyivan Rus were closer to the main themes in Ukrainian history than to Russian historical traditions.99 The inheritance of the political culture of Kyivan Rus by Volhynia-Galiciaand not Vladimir-Suzdal/Muscovyhas been ignored by Western and Russian historians because it would upset their historiographical framework of Russian history beginning in Kyivan Rus. If Vladimir-Suzdal/Muscovy did not inherit the traditions and political culture of Kyivan Rus it would be
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dif cult to see how it could claim that it is the direct descendant and second stage of Russian history.
Towards a New Framework for the History of the Eastern Slavs Are historiography, myths and legends important in the formation of national identities? The answer to this question is given by Ukrainian President Kuchma who believes that History may not be limited to peoples attitudes to the past. History continues in the present and has an impact on forming the future.100 Historiography plays both an important part in creating and sustaining a national We while laying claim to earlier or rst settlement in disputed territories. The disintegration of the former USSR into independent states has allowed them to re-think and re-write their historiographies. Since 1992 the Russian Federation has also been building an inclusive, civic nation-state. For the rst time in Russian history this new civic nation-state could become the basis for a new History of Russia, which would focus only upon the territory of the Russian Federation. This territorial approach would be far preferable to any ethnic and cultural vision which would have to deal, in Russian eyes, with the troublesome question of whether the eastern Slavs are one people or three separate nations. Nearly a century ago Hrushevskyi had already suggested a framework for the rational writing of the history of the eastern Slavs. Hrushevskyi though was ignored by Western historians, and was denounced by post-Leninist Soviet authorities as a Ukrainian bourgeois nationalist and by Tsarist and Western historians as a nationalist. Riasanovskys well known A History of Russia, for example, made only one reference to him when brie y discussing the Zaporozhzhian Cossacks.101 Usually, when Hrushevskyi was mentioned by Western historians it was to deride him as someone providing a nationalistic viewpoint.102 Two prominent Western historians of Ukraine have approached Ukrainian history from different approaches.103 Orest Subtelny has surveyed the Ukrainian people and his Ukraine. A History104 is therefore a direct descendant of the one-volume surveys of Hrushevskyi and Doroshenko.105 It is very similar to their work in that it is less a history of Ukraine than a history of the Ukrainian people.106 Only ve of nearly 700 pages are devoted to non-Ukrainians. Subtelnys Ukraine. A History has become the most widely used textbook in Ukraine in the teaching of history. One author claimed that this book is without exaggeration triumphantly dominant within our education system.107 University History Departments utilise the Ukrainian and Russian-language translations of his history in their curricula without any noticeable problems. The popularity of Subtelnys Ukraine. A History is a re ection of the radical reinterpretation of Ukrainian historiography called into play by state and nation building in Ukraine. Of the Ukrainian and Russian translations 800,000 copies of Subtelnys volume have been sold and it has become the most popular textbook of Ukrainian history in Ukraine.108 Magoscis A History of Ukraine will also shortly appear in Ukrainian translation in Ukraine. In contrast to Subtelny, Paul R. Magoscis A History of Ukraine adopts a different approach which new Histories of Russia also might do well to emulate. Instead of focusing upon ethnic Ukrainians it attempts to encapsulate all of the events and peoples who have lived, and still live, on Ukrainian territory. This is a territorial approach to history, which approximates those commonly found in histories of Western Europe.
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Magoscis nearly 800-page A History of Ukraine is marketed as a book that covers 2,500 years of Ukraines history. The preface explains its purpose: Until now, most histories of Ukraine have been histories of the Ukrainian people. While this book also traces the evolution of Ukrainians, it tries as well to give judicious treatment to the many other peoples who developed within the borders of Ukraine, including the Greeks, the Crimean Tatars, the Poles, the Russians, the Jews, the Germans, and the Romanians. Only through an understanding of all their cultures can one hope to gain an adequate introduction to Ukrainian history. In other words, this book is not simply a history of Ukrainians, but a survey of a wide variety of developments that have taken place during the past two and a half millennia on the territory encompassed by the boundaries of the contemporary state of Ukraine. In the post-Soviet era, when Russia and Ukraine both are building civic nation-states, traditional Tsarist, Soviet or Western historiography of Russia is out of step with the times. To continue writing Russian history as that which equates empire with nation-state, Russian with the east Slavs, would be the equivalent of post-war German historians continuing to write German history as including Austria with its Germanspeaking and cultural world. In the interest of veracity the teaching and writing of history, as well as the formulation of historiography, must not be divorced from the evolution and creation of national identity. The forging of a new non-imperial civic Russian national identity to match its new nation-state can only be undertaken by removing the ethnic and cultural factors that underpinned imperial historiography in favour of a new post-Soviet Russian historiography based on territorial criteria con ned to the borders of the Russian Federation. By undertaking this step Russian historiography, both in the Russian Federation and in the West, will democratise and come to resemble that which is most commonly found in Western Europe. France and Britain both have links to Rome and the Roman empire, but the Histories of France and Britain are con ned to the borders of the nation-states created during the past two centuries. This might be the model for the Russian Federation in the post-Soviet era. Based on such a framework the origins of the Russian Federation should be sought in Vladimir-Suzdal and Muscovy, the basis of the pre-imperial Russian nation-state, and not Kyivan Rus. Conclusions After 1934 Soviet historiography largely reverted to its pre-Soviet roots and re-adopted the imperialist and statist schema created in the eigthteenthnineteenth centuries. This imperial framework was also followed largely by Western historians of Russia. In Tsarist, Soviet and Western histories of Russia the medieval state of Kyiv Rus was nationalised on behalf of Russian history. Ukrainians and Belarusians were ignored, for the most part they only appeared brie y in the mid-seventeenth century as Cossacks who allied themselves with Muscovy, then again in 1917. It was never made clear how Ukrainians came to be living on territory that had been primordial Russian territory. Whereas Russian e ` migre ` historians were treated as objective Ukrainian and Belarusian historians, such as Hrushevskyi, were portrayed as nationalists by Russian, Soviet and Western historians, his works were generally ignored. With the disintegration of the former USSR state and nation building is being accompanied by the formulation of new and old national historiographies, myths and
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legends in all 15 Soviet successor states. It is therefore the task of historians, both in Russia and the West, to create a new methodology and prepare new histories of Russia which are based territorially upon the Russian Federation. By continuing to utilise a eighteenthnineteenth century imperialist and statist framework Western and Russian historians are undermining the civic nation building project in the Russian Federation. A territorially based history of the Russian Federation, similar to the framework used in Magoscis A History of Ukraine, could incorporate all citizens in Russia, irrespective of ethnicity. Civic nation building in the Russian Federation is one of six competing nation and state building projects, has a minority following and is alien to the majority of elites and the public.109 As Hoskings admits, a civic de nition of Russian identity runs counter to Russian traditions and It is historically very weakly grounded.110 Continued use of an imperialist historiography makes the task of civic nation building in the Russian Federation, which is already described by Tolz and Hoskings as tenuous, more dif cult to accomplish. By its very nature a history territorially based upon the Russian Federation accomplishes three tasks. Firstly, it no longer utilises the imperial statist framework used by Tsarist and Western historians that subsumed Russian within imperial history. Secondly, it avoids the temptation of including Belarusians and Ukrainians within Russian history. Russian history that incorporates the three eastern Slavs is one that treats Ukrainians, Russians and Belarusians as organically close and destined to live in close association with one another. Such a history would be that endorsed by Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka because it denies the authenticity of Ukrainian and Belarusian claims to separate nationhood. Thirdly, a non-imperial Russian historiography supports the building of a civic, inclusive Russian nation-state within the borders of the Russian Federation where all those living within this state are Russian citizens. A territorially-based history of the Russian Federation could therefore incorporate all ethnic groups within the Russian Federation. Magoscis A History of Ukraine also includes a multitude of ethnic groups resident in Ukraine and is not con ned to only ethnic Ukrainians. In the twenty- rst century, and over a decade after the USSR disintegrated, it is incumbent upon historians in both Russia and the West no longer to continue utilising a framework developed two centuries earlier by imperial historians in the Tsarist Russian empire. Although such a framework came to be de ned as objective by Western scholars it is anything but so and is imperialist and diametrically at odds with the policies of those seeking to build a civic Russian nation-state within the con nes of the borders of the Russian Federation. Correspondence: Taras Kuzio, Centre for International and Security Studies, 3rd Floor York Lanes, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario M5J IP3, Canada. Notes
1. This article was originally presented as a lengthier paper entitled The East Slavic Conundrum: History and National Identity at the conference on National Identities. History, geography, image, Institute of Historical Research, University of London, 2022 April 1998. I have used the of cial Ukrainian transliteration of Kyiv and not the commonly accepted Kiev which is transliterated from Russian. 2. David G. Rowley, Imperial versus national discourse: the case of Russia, Nations and Nationalism, 6/1, 2000, p. 23. 3. Ibid., p. 28. The political and nationality programme of the Whites are extensively discussed in
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Ana Procyk, Russian Nationalism and Ukraine: The Nationality Policy of the Volunteer Army During the Civil War During the Civil War (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1995). 4. See chapter 11, The Myth of Russian Nationalism, in Alexander J. Motyl (ed.), Sovietology, Rationality, Nationality. Coming to Grips with Nationalism in the USSR (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 161173. 5. Anatol Lieven, The Weakness of Russian Nationalism, Survival, 41/2, 1999, pp. 5370. 6. See chapter one, The Demise of the Soviet Union and the Emergence of Independent Ukraine, in Paul DAnieri, Robert Kravchuk and Taras Kuzio (eds), Politics and Society in Ukraine (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1999), pp. 1044. 7. See Ilya Prizel, National Identity and Foreign Policy. Nationalism and Leadership in Poland, Russia, and Ukraine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 153299. 8. Yitzhak M.Brudny, Reinventing Russia. Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State, 19531991 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 261. 9. For critical accounts of nationalism in Ukraine and the theory of nationalising states see Taras Kuzio, Nationalism in Ukraine: Towards a New Framework, Politics, 20/2, 2000, pp. 7786 and Nationalising States or Nation-building? A Critical Review of the Theoretical Literature and Empirical Evidence, Nations and Nationalism, 7/2, 2001, pp. 135154. 10. Quoted from Stephen Velychenko, Restructuring and the Non-Russian Past, Nationalities Papers, 22/2, 1994, p. 327. 11. Lowell R. Tillet, Soviet Second Thoughts on Tsarist Colonialism, Foreign Affairs, 42/2, 1964, p. 310. See also L.R. Tillet, Nationalism and History, Problems of Communism, XVI/5, 1967, pp. 3645. 12. L.R. Tillet, The Great Friendship. Soviet Historians on the Non-Russian Nationalities (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), p. 4. See also Anatole G. Mazour, Modern Russian Historiography (Westport, CO and London: Greenwood Press, 1975). 13. Stephen Velychenko, The Of cial Soviet View of Ukrainian History, Journal of Ukrainian Studies, 10/2, 1985, p. 84. 14. In a 1993 poll of ethnic Russians in the Russian Federation three quarters believed that Ukrainians were not a separate people and therefore should not have an independent state. See Paul A. Goble, The Ukrainian Security Trap, The Ukrainian Quarterly, 50/3, 1994, p. 230. 15. S. Velychenko, National History and the History of the USSR: The Persistence and Impact of Categories, in Donald V. Schwartz and Razmik Panosian (eds), Nationalism and History. The Politics of Nation-Building in Post-Soviet Armenia, Azerbaidzhan and Georgia (Toronto: University of Toronto, Centre for Russian and East European Studies, 1994), p. 28. 16. See T. Kuzio, National Identity in Independent Ukraine: An Identity in Transition, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 2/4, 1996, pp. 582608. 17. Volodymyr Hryniovs book was published by Abrys in Kyiv in 1995. 18. S. Velychenko, Shaping Identity in Eastern Europe and Russia (New York: St Martins Press, 1993), pp. 140, 160, 167 and 210. 19. S. Velychenko, The Origins of the Of cial Soviet Interpretation of Eastern Slavic History. A Case Study of Policy Formulation, Forschungen Zur Osteuropaischen Geschichte, Band 46, 1992, p. 238. 20. Interview with Prof. Mark von Hagen, Director of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University, 19 November 1996. 21. Interview with S. Velychenko, University of Toronto, 21 November 1996. 22. See the attempt by the well known historian Vladimir I. Vernadsky to explain the Ukrainian Question to Russians in the 1910s in his Ukraiinske Pytannia I Rosiiska Hromadkist , Moloda hvardiya, 12 March 1988. See also the modern equivalent of this attempt to explain to Russians the Ukrainian drive to independence by the Moscow-based Ukrainian historian Aleksandr Hrushevskyi, Ukrainskyi Vopros. Problema gosudarstvennogo suvereniteta, Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 1 June 1991. 23. Op cit., S. Velychenko, Shaping Identity in Eastern Europe and Russia, p. 191. 24. Kievski vedomostie, 28 November 1996. 25. See the largely negative review of post-Soviet books on Russia by Serhii Plokhy in the Journal of Ukrainian Studies, 21/12, 1996, pp. 342345. 26. M. von Hagen, After the Soviet Union: Rethinking Modern Russian History, The Seventeenth Annual Philadelphia Theta Distinguished Lecture on History, 1977, p. 9. 27. Hugh Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire, 18011917 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967). 28. Theodore R.Weeks, Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia. Nationalism and Russi cation on the Western Frontier, 18631914 (De Kalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996), pp. 34.
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29. Ibid., p. 11. 30. Ibid., pp. 46 and 64. 31. Ibid., p. 93. 32. Andrew Wilson, Ukrainian Nationalism in the 1990s. A Minority Faith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 256. See the critical reviews by Frank Sysyn, The Harriman Review, 10/2, 1997, pp. 1220, by Mykola Riabchuk in the Kyiv newspaper article Den , 18 September 1997 and by T.Kuzio, International Affairs, 73/2, 1997, p. 386. 33. Ibid., A. Wilson, Ukrainian Nationalism in the 1990s , p. 214. 34. T.R. Weeks argues that the Tsarist authorities attempted to expand the use of Russian while restricting the non-Russian languages. That the Russian government wanted to encourage assimilation of non-Russians into the Russian nation seems on the whole undeniable, though not entirely unprobable (consider the Jewish example), Weeks believes. Op cit., T.R.Weeks, Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia. p. 12. See also David Saunders, Russia and Ukraine under Alexander II: The Valuev Edict of 1863, The International History Review, XV11/1, 1995, pp. 2350, and his Russias Ukrainian Policy (18471903): A Demographic Approach, European History Quarterly, 25/2, 1995, pp. 181208. 35. Op cit., M. von Hagen. After the Soviet Union . 36. This was certainly the view found by this author when undertaking his Masters degree at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London in the mid 1980s. 37. See A.J. Motyl, Sovietology in One Country or Comparative Nationality Studies?, Slavic Review, 48/1, 1989, pp. 8390 and Orest Subtelny, American Sovietologys Great Blunder: The Marginalization of the Nationality Issue, Nationalities Papers, 22/1, 1994, pp. 141155. 38. Pal Kolsto, Political Construction Sites. Nation-building in Russia and the Post-Soviet States (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000), p. 35. 39. Zenon E. Kohut, Bringing Ukrainian History into the Curriculum, Newsnet , 37/4, 1997, p. 9. See also his History as a Battleground: Russian-Ukrainian Relations and Historical Consciousness in Contemporary Ukraine in Frederick S. Starr (ed.), The Legacy of History in Russia and the New States of Eurasia (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1994), pp. 123146. 40. Roman Szporluk, Ukraine: From an Imperial Periphery to a Sovereign State, Daedalus , 126/3, 1997, p. 88. 41. B.H. Summner, Survey of Russian History (London: Duckworth, 1947), p. 224. 42. Vladimir Volkoff, Vladimir the Russian Viking (n.p.: Honeyglen Publishing, 1984), p. XIII. 43. John Lawrence, A History of Russia (New York: New American Library, 1969). 44. James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe. An Interpretative History of Russian Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1970). 45. Ibid., pp. 3, 7, 8 and 13. 46. Basil Dmytryshyn, Medieval Russia. A Source Book, 9001700 (New York: Praeger, 1973). 47. J. Martin, Medieval Russia 9801584 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 48. Ibid., p. 375. 49. Lionel Kochan, The Making of Modern Russia (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974). 50. Ibid., p. 11. 51. Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, A History of Russia (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). 52. Michael Florinsky, Russia. A History. Two volumes (New York: Macmillan, 1953). 53. Riasanovsky, A History of Russia, p. 25. 54. Ibid., p. 27. 55. Ibid., pp. 224, 229, 300 and 307. 56. Vremya, 25 April 1991. The event is recounted by Roman Laba in his How Yeltsins Exploitation of Ethnic Nationalism Brought Down an Empire, Transition , 2/1, 1996, p. 12. 57. Riasanovsky, A History of Russia, pp. 98, 99 and 146156. 58. M. Florinsky, Russia. A History and an Interpretation (New York: Macmillan, 1953), pp. 18 and 19. 59. Ibid., p. 31. 60. Ibid., p. 41. 61. Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepard, The Emergence of Rus 7501200 (London and New York: Longman, 1996), p. XVII. 62. Ibid. 63. Geoffrey Hoskings, Russia. People & Empire, 15521917 (London: Harper-Collins, 1997). 64. See the negative review by John OMahony in Russia Review, 19 May 1997. 65. Op cit., G. Hoskings, Russia. People & Empire, p. XIX.
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66. Ibid. 67. Presentation by G. Hoskings at the launch of his Russia. People & Empire at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London, 23 April 1997. 68. Op cit., N. Riasanovsky, A History of Russia, p. 154. 69. Ibid., p. 27. 70. Ibid., p. 379. 71. See T. Kuzio and Marc Nordberg, Nation and State Building, Historical Legacies and National Identities in Belarus and Ukraine: A Comparative Analysis, Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism , XXVI/12 (1999), pp. 6990 and Stephen Eke and Taras Kuzio, The Socio-Political Roots of Authoritarian Populism in Belarus, Europe-Asia Studies, 52/3, 2000, pp. 523547. 72. Paul R. Magosci, A History of Ukraine (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), p. 456. See also chapter two, Nation Building and National Identity in op cit., P. DAnieri, R. Kravchuk and T. Kuzio, Politics and Society in Ukraine, pp. 4570 and Pal Kolsto, Political Construction Sites. Nation-Building in Russia and the Post-Soviet States (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000), pp. 168193. 73. Archie Brown, Michael Kaiser and Gerald S. Smith (eds), The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Russia and the Former Soviet Union (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 74. Martin Gilbert, Dent Atlas of Russian History (London: Routledge, 1993). 75. John Channon and Robert Hudson, Penguin Historical Atlas of Russia (London: Penguin Books, 1995). 76. Norman Davies, Europe. A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 41. 77. Op cit., R. Szporluk, Ukraine: From an Imperial Periphery to a Sovereign State, p. 95. 78. D. Saunders, What Makes a Nation a Nation?, Ukrainians Since 1600, Ethnic Groups, 10, 1993, p. 101. 79. Ibid., pp. 102103. 80. As cited by former US Ambassador to Ukraine, Roman Popadiuk, at the American Political Science Association annual congress, Washington, DC, 2831 August 1997. 81. See chapter nine, History, myths and symbols in T. Kuzio (ed.), Ukraine. State and Nation Building (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 198229. 82. Quoted from L. Kuchmas preface to Mykhailo Hrushevskyi (Kyiv: Ukraiina, 1996). 83. The Ukrainian Weekly, 9 November 1997. 84. See M. Hrushevsky, The Traditional Scheme of Russian History and the Problem of a Rational Organization of the History of the Eastern Slavs, The Annals of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the US, 2/4, 1952, pp. 355364. 85. Rossiyskiye Vesti, 28 May 1997. 86. R. Szporluk, The Ukraine and Russia in Robert Conquest (ed.), The Last Empire. Nationality and the Soviet Future (Stanford: Stanford University, 1986), pp. 160162. See also Dmytryi Furman, Ukraina I Myi, Svobodnaya Mysl, 1, 1995, pp. 6983. 87. See T. Kuzio, Borders, Symbolism and Nation-State Building: Ukraine and Russia, Geopolitics and International Boundaries, 2/2, 1997, pp. 3656. 88. See Victor Stepanenko, The Construction of Identity and School Policy in Ukraine (Commack, NY: Nova Science, 1999), Jan Germen Janmaat, Nation Building in Post-Soviet Ukraine. Educationa l Policy and the Response of the Russian-Speaking Population (Amsterdam: Netherlands Geographical Studies, 2000) and J.G. Janmaat, Identity Construction and Education: The History of Ukraine in Soviet and Post-Soviet Schoolbooks in T. Kuzio and Paul DAnieri (eds), Nation Building, Identity and Regionalism in Ukraine, forthcoming. 89. A. Wilson, Myths of National History in Belarus and Ukraine in G. Hosking and George Schop in (eds), Myths & Nationhood (London: Hurst and Co, 1997), pp. 182197 and A. Wilson, National History and National Identity in Ukraine and Belarus in Graham Smith, Vivien Law, A. Wilson, Annette Bohr and Edward Allworth (eds), Nation-building in the Post-Soviet Borderlands. The Politics of National Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 2347. 90. See Wilfried Jilge, Staatssymbolik und nationale Identitat in der postkommunistischen Ukraine, Ethnos-Nation , 6/12, 1998, pp. 85113. 91. Op cit., P. Magosci, A History of Ukraine, pp. 25 and 36. 92. A. Lieven, Ukraine and Russia. A Fraternal Rivalry (Washington, DC: US Institute of Peace, 1999), p. 13. 93. Ibid., pp. 14 and 15. 94. Istoriia Rusov ili Maloy Rossiy (Moscow: University Publishers, 1846). Republished in Ukrainian translation by the Kyiv publishers Radianskyi Pys mennyk in 1991. 95. Jeremy Paxman, The English. A Portrait of a People (London: Penguin, 1999), p. 54.
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96. Slovakia and the Ukrainian region of Trans-Carpathia were under Hungarian rule in the Austro-Hungarian empire. Hungarian nationality policies were far more restrictive than in Austrian-ruled Galicia and Bukovina where Ruthenians (in Ukrainian Rusyny ) were encouraged to evolve into Ukrainians. 97. Jaroslav Pelenski, The Contest for the Legacy of Kievan Rus (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1998), p. 57. 98. The different schools of post-Soviet Ukrainian historiography are discussed in Georgii Kasianov, Rewriting and Rethinking. Contemporary Historiography and Nation Building in Ukraine in op cit., T. Kuzio and Paul DAnieri (eds), Nation Building, Identity and Regionalism in Ukraine, forthcoming . 99. Vasyl Kremen, Dmytro Tabachnyk and Vasyl Tkachenko, Ukraiina: Alternatyvy Postupu. Krytyka Istorychnoho Dosvidu (n.p.: ARC-UKRAINE, 1996), p. 111. All three authors are closely linked to the L. Kuchma presidency in Ukraine. I reviewed this long historical study in the Journal of Ukrainian Studies, 23/1, 1998, pp. 137140. 100. Uriadovyi Kurier, 13 November 1997. 101. Riasanovsky, A History of Russia, p. 198. 102. Billington, The Icon and the Axe, p. 624. 103. Both volumes were published by the University of Toronto Press. Orest Subtelny is a Professor at York University and Paul Magosci a Professor and holder of the Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Toronto. 104. O. Subtelny, Ukraine. A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press and the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1988). 105. Review of Subtelnys Ukraine. A History by P. R. Magosci in the Journal of Ukrainian Studies, 21/12, 1996, p. 249. 106. Ibid., pp. 251252. 107. Natalia Yakovenko, Do Pytannia Pro Metodolohiya Vyvchennia Istorii Ukraiiny, Heneza, 4, 1996, p. 120. See also V.F. Soldatenko, Ukraiins ka Ideya. Istorychnyi Narys (Kyiv: Naukova Dumka, 1995), p. 11. 108. A Ukrainian-language edition was published as Ukraiina. Istoriya (Kyiv: Lybid, 1991) and in Russian under the same title (Kyiv: Lybid, 1994). 109. Vera Tolz, Forging the Nation: National Identity and Nation Building in Post-Communist Russia, Europe-Asia Studies, 50/6, 1998, pp. 9931022 and Homeland Myths and Nation-State Building in Postcommunist Russia, Slavic Review, 57/2, 1998, pp. 267294. 110. G. Hoskings, Can Russia become a Nation-state?, Nations and Nationalism, 4/4, 1998, p. 457.

Historiography and National Identity Among The Eastern Slavs Towards A New Framework

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Historiography and National Identity Among The Eastern Slavs Towards A New Framework

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National Identities, Vol. 3, No.

Historiography and National Identity among the Eastern Slavs

Historiography and National Identity among the Eastern Slavs

Historiography and National Identity among the Eastern Slavs

Historiography and National Identity among the Eastern Slavs

Historiography and National Identity among the Eastern Slavs

Historiography and National Identity among the Eastern Slavs

Historiography and National Identity among the Eastern Slavs

Historiography and National Identity among the Eastern Slavs

Historiography and National Identity among the Eastern Slavs

Historiography and National Identity among the Eastern Slavs

Historiography and National Identity among the Eastern Slavs

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